Will we see more and more streaming festivals? Two days ago Disney+ announced that following an agreement with Live Nation this year it will broadcast live broadcasts of three American festivals worldwide, Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo and Austin City Limits, something that its “sister” platform Hulu has been doing for six years. Festivals have become a product not only of YouTube and therefore visible for free, but also of a subscription streaming platform. For Kevin Chernett, Executive Vice President and Head of Global Media Partnerships at Live Nation, music festivals once reserved for those who could be physically present “are becoming global live moments that fans want to experience together and in real time, wherever they are in the world”. The livestream offering of the performances will be enriched by behind-the-scenes content and interviews with the artists in a specially created studio. The lines between festivals, TV and streaming entertainment are becoming more blurred.
Once upon a time you were either there or you weren't there, no in-between. If you missed the festival you sometimes had to make do with poorly recorded bootlegs, grainy sleight-of-hand footage, more or less (often more) overexcited reports. For some time this has no longer been the case. Not only because for years now everyone has been filming everything and within a few hours YouTube and social media are filled with videos that tell what happened on stage, but because of livestreaming which is increasingly becoming a sort of digital festival within the real festival, a system with its own language, brands that sponsor it, a specific audience, its own economy. It's no longer just a concert stream: it's an event within an event. Not very real, decidedly global and spread in real time.
In April, Coachella further expanded its offering on YouTube (and beyond), offering the chance to see what was happening live on seven different stages. One of the key moments of the festival's partnership with the platform is represented by the 2018 edition, that of the Beyoncé concert. During the first weekend, the festival's live broadcast totaled 41 million contacts from 232 different countries, a historic record up to that point. Since then, Coachella on YouTube (and on other platforms) has become a festival within the festival that generates (it is estimated) hundreds of millions of views between livestreams, videos of individual songs selected and clips shared in the following days. The digital event overflows into other social networks, with hundreds of millions of views of key moments and widespread diffusion. Live broadcasts on Twitch of other festivals – such as Lost Landsrenamed here Couch Lands precisely to underline the use from the sofa – they have hundreds of thousands of users. Amazon Music successfully broadcast Primavera, Stagecoach, Fuji Rock Festival. In 2025 part of Montreux ended up on YouTube. Last year's Tomorrowland livestreams on TikTok totaled 74 million unique visitors, and content tagged with the hashtag #Tomorrowland had nearly two and a half billion views. Not to mention live broadcasts on traditional TV, as the BBC does with Glastonbury.
During the period of Covid restrictions, when in-person concerts were replaced by poorly arranged live concerts and occasionally by notable productions such as the Where Do We Go? by Billie Eilish or Study 2054 by Dua Lipa, there has been a wave of optimism about the spread of livestreaming as a tool of the future and even as a possible alternative to “real” concerts. People, in reality, couldn't wait to get away from the screens and mix with thousands of other people. The result was the shelving of the idea of livestreaming as an alternative to concerts and an epochal surge in the live market and the hunger for events across half the world, including Italy, with never-before-seen requests for tickets and increasingly higher prices for the most coveted shows.
The model that is proving to be successful is not the production of ad hoc events, but the use of large streaming festivals which attract the attention of fans from all over the world. And attention, as we know, can be monetised. There is no data available on the economic agreements between festival organizers and platforms, but a festival is content that attracts views already substantially produced and ready to be sold and perhaps arouse the curiosity of new potential paid users. The platforms have other content and a market to exploit, in addition to the traditional concert films present in the catalog (Disney+, for example, has the contents ofEras Tour by Taylor Swift, as well as concerts and documentaries on tours of all types and artists, from Elton John to Olivia Rodrigo). As for festivals and organizers, they have another source of income. Thanks to live broadcasts and the social content they generate, artists can count on global attention that perhaps they wouldn't have, just think of the chatter around Justin Bieber's headlining show at the last Coachella. The big pop names plan shows knowing that they will be broadcast, commented on, transformed into clips (and in the meantime, the integration between the music streaming and ticketing industries takes various forms, from the hypothesis of selling tickets and experiences on platforms to the experiments in the production of online concerts by the Chinese multinational Tencent).
The mass of people who witnessed the duet of Sabrina Carpenter and Madonna in the Californian desert was impressive. Even more so is the number of people who saw it on YouTube live and deferred, in the videos taken from the live broadcast, and in the comments on social media. It is an approach that, speaking of Tomorrowland, Michael Kümmerle, Global Head of Music Partnership Development at TikTok, called “holistic” underlining “the incredible impact, engagement and value for artists, both inside and outside the platform”. In a world where numbers count more and more, the success of a performance is no longer measured only by the number of tickets sold, but also by the number of views on phones, tablets, computers, TV.
